The George N. Atiyeh Award is an annual affair in hopes of recognizing aspiring Middle East subject specialist librarians. The Committee wants to start by thanking all the applicants for their interest. This year, the prize goes to an exceptional young colleague: Mitra Fakhrashrafi.
After completing a Masters Degree in Arts Geography and Planning, Mitra enrolled at the University of Toronto iSchool. Her MA thesis and accompanying art exhibition focused on how the City of Toronto hookah/shisha ban legislation passed in 2020 “shaped Muslim peoples’ experiences (…) in the Greater Toronto Area”. During her undergraduate studies, Mitra Fakhrashrafi was the Women & Trans Centre programming director, where she realized what a powerful tool for social transformation public programming can be. As an MA student, she engaged in social justice initiatives, advocating for the rights of Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and racialized people in Toronto.
Mitra Fakhrashrafi’s interests lie at the intersection of art librarianship, community archives, advocacy, and diaspora. She recently joined the Muslims in Canada Archive (MiCA), a participatory archive aiming at recording the history of Canada’s Muslim populations. She is looking forward to meeting library and information professionals working with Middle Eastern and/or Muslim communities, engaging in information literacy, managing digitization projects and multilingual resources.
Sincere congratulations, Mitra.
The George N. Atiyeh Prize Committee
Anaïs Salamon, McGill University, Chair
Nora Avetyan, UCLA
Maurice Hines, Saint Elizabeth University